A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."

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Archive of Wolff Materials

Monday, August 24, 2015

MORNING MUSINGS ON SCHOLARSHIP AND THE CLOUD

I am no sort of scholar, as I have observed many times on
this blog.Perhaps that is why I stand
in awe of the scholars I have been privileged to meet.My first encounter with a world-class scholar
was as a sophomore at Harvard, back in 1952, sixty-three years ago.I sat for a semester in Harry Austryn
Wolfson's great course on Spinoza's Ethics.We all knew that none of us would ever be,
could ever be, a scholar like Wolfson, but simply to sit in his presence was a blessing
-- rather like listening to Yo-Yo Ma play the Bach Suites for unaccompanied
cello.

Nine years later, when I left my Harvard Instructorship to
take up an Assistant Professorship at the University of Chicago, I was powerfully
impressed by the fact that one of my new colleagues would be Alan Gewirth, whom
the philosophical world new as a moral and political philosopher, but who was,
to me, the editor of the edition of Marsilius of Padua's Defensor Pacis that I had read during my half year on an SSRC
post-doctoral fellowship.Three years
later still, when I moved to a tenured Associate Professorship at Columbia, it
was not Ernest Nagel or John Herman Randall or Arthur Danto or Sidney
Morgenbesser whose presence in my new department impressed me, but Paul
Kristeller.

Paul was a German scholar of the Renaissance thirty years my
senior.Among his great achievements was
the Iter Italicum, a catalogue of
early manuscripts that he painstakingly assembled during his years in Italy by
going from castle to castle, monastery to monastery, and to the Vatican
archives as well, recording what he had found.It was the sort of laborious act of scholarship that earned one fame and
honor back in the days before the Internet.It was a source of great sadness to me that during the '68 Columbia student
uprising, because we took up opposite sides in that dispute, Paul stopped talking
to me.When the two of us rode up to the
seventh floor of Philosophy Hall in the building's tiny elevator, Paul would
turn his face away from me in a physical act of rejection.

In those days, one could even gain scholarly recognition by
doing something that a computer now accomplishes with a few simple
commands.One philosopher, whose name
escapes me, made a name for himself by laboriously cranking out a concordance
to the works of Spinoza -- useful, to be sure, but now the sort of task one
would assign to an undergraduate for extra credit.

These random thoughts, which engaged me during my walk this
morning, were prompted by the latest exchange in the comments section of this
blog.I posted a response to Sheryl
Mitchell in which I attributed to Hillary Clinton the tone-deaf remark
"All lives matter" as a response to the Black Lives Matter protestors
at one of her campaign events.At 4:42
p.m. yesterday, Matt Austern questioned my attribution.Sixty-eight minutes later, someone writing
under the pseudonym "Lounger" popped up with a link to an NPRstory confirming my memory.

Young people these days are so accustomed to these sorts of
things that they cannot understand why old folks like me continued to be
astonished by them.What would Harry
Wolfson, Alan Gewirth, and Paul Kristeller think, if they were still with us?

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.